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Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…
A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…
Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…
Steering vectors (SVs) have been proposed as an effective approach to adjust language model behaviour at inference time by intervening on intermediate model activations. They have shown promise in terms of improving both capabilities and…
Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…
This paper investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent non-English tokens -- a question that remains underexplored despite recent progress. We propose a lightweight intervention method using representation steering, where a…
Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…
While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…
Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…
Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…
The ability to follow instructions is crucial for numerous real-world applications of language models. In pursuit of deeper insights and more powerful capabilities, we derive instruction-specific vector representations from language models…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse domains but often suffer from overconfidence, limiting their reliability in critical applications. We propose SteerConf, a novel framework that systematically steers…
We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis,…
Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is essential for aligning outputs with human abilities and safety requirements. \emph{Activation steering} provides a lightweight alternative to prompt engineering…
Activation steering has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream behaviors. However, most existing steering methods rely on a single static direction per task or concept, making…
We introduce SteeringSafety, a systematic framework for evaluating representation steering methods across seven safety perspectives spanning 17 datasets. While prior work highlights general capabilities of representation steering, we…